Telecommunication carriers provide many services to their customers and each of these services requires the involvement of many heterogeneous systems to provision and maintain such services. Specifically, telecommunication carriers have telecommunication networks which connect and manage the services provided to their customers' networks. For example, telecommunication carriers provide services such as voice grade communication channels, frame relay services, nodal services, internet protocol (IP) services, and the like. Many of these services allow for a customer to make voice or data calls which terminate outside the customer's network and to receive calls which originate outside the customer's network. Other services provided by a telecommunication carrier include providing high speed data links to allow data to be transmitted externally from the customer's network and received from external parties to the customer's network. Many of the facilities which carry voice, data, or both require change management which depends on the individual needs of the customer.
Customers' needs vary depending on their business practices and policies, technologies, optimization routines, network designs, outstanding service orders, and existing service inventories. These needs drive how each customer interacts with a telecommunication carrier. For example, one customer may emphasize providing reliable external network access while another customer may emphasize limiting their telecommunication financial expenses at the expense of service quality. Enterprise customers may have large and complex networks while smaller customers may have small and simple networks. In any case, customers' needs may further depend on their own corporate demographics such as corporate size, their network's size, their business objectives, their financial cost structure, and the market in which they operate.
Today's interaction between customers and telecommunication carriers typically involve a customer calling a carrier's call center or a customer requesting a service or service modification through a session over the Internet provided by a telecommunication carrier's website. Each time a customer wants to make a change to an existing service or manage an interaction between the customer's network and the telecommunication carrier's network, a separate phone call or Internet session is required. Each time much of the same information is requested from the customer as has been previously provided during previous orders to tailor the service to their liking. For example, a customer, because of its network growth, may require an additional 64 kb/sec (DS0) voice channel to be connected to the customer's PBX network. The customer calls the telecommunication carrier's call center or logs on to the carrier's website to make the request. Each time the customer's network grows, the customer has to make a request to expand the carrier's service requiring the customer's direct attention. Further, perhaps an additional DS0 voice channel would put the customer over a threshold amount of DS0 voice channels where it becomes more cost effective to lease an entire T1.5 line. Unless the carrier prompts the customer, the customer may miss the opportunity to optimize their connection while saving on telecommunication expenses. In specifying the details of the T1.5 line, the customer may have to specify many of the details which are common to those specified on a previous T1.5 order. However, even if the details had commonalities with a previous T1.5 order, there exists no control system to determine which details of what order could be leveraged for the present T1.5 order.
Furthermore, many existing heterogeneous telecommunications systems exist today which manage the interaction with customers such as an inventory system, an ordering system, a trouble reporting system, an alarm system, a billing system, and the like. Over time these systems and the services offered through these systems have become complex such that it becomes extremely difficult for a telecommunication carrier salesperson to be aware of all the services that could be offered to a customer. For that matter, it becomes even more difficult to determine which services best fit the particular needs of the customer.
Clearly, methods and systems are needed to achieve automated customer control of network management activities when a particular event such as customer network growth, network utilization, computer virus intrusion, network failure, disaster recovery or the like occurs. Such automated control of customer network management activities should reflect the customer's business policies and procedures in addition to the customer's optimization routines, the customer's network designs, customer's services ordered, and the customer's existing inventories.